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MEDA302 Critical Reflection.

Fooled you with that last post;
Here’s my final blog post for uni.
A critical reflection upon my work, which I ended up titling ~Focus~.

What is it?
The work is a screen based interactive projection. It involves two phases:
The first is a Processing code which generates a timer. This timer is surrounded by a circle, and as the timer ticks on, every ten seconds the circle flashes from grey to red. After sixty seconds, the second phase begins. This consists of a slideshow of various memes, sourced both from the internet and made personally by myself. These internet memes cycle around every five seconds.

Situated in front of the projector screen is a plinth with a computer mouse on it. If the mouse is clicked while in phase one, it resets the unseen counter on the slideshow trigger. However, if pressed during the slideshow in phase two, it will trigger back to phase one.

Why?The idea behind this project is time. During the iteration process it occurred to me just how much time we as a society waste on seemingly meaningless tasks, like looking at internet memes, playing video games, watching Youtube videos, etc. I desired to elicit a response which made people think about how they spend their time by making them constantly need to click the mouse to focus in on the timer and stop themselves from being distracted by the memes.

The timer itself had a deeper meaning as well. The flashes every ten seconds were indicative of the amount of people who die from vaccine preventable diseases, being roughly one every ten seconds.

Reception.It became quickly apparent that the message was unfortunately not apparent. Despite positive feedback from previous iterations, the final work seemed to not fall into line with what I had previously produced. Viewers seemed bored by it, and even after reading the statement they did not entirely grasp why certain aspects were used to represent what they were meant to.

Overall, the project was received poorly. Suggestions were made to the format (i.e. not having the work projected) as well as the presentation method needing to be cleaner and more crisp.
A reworking was suggested for the final grad show, in which I will be trialing the work as a smaller screen work, involving the laptop as the screen and utilising more iconography to encourage interaction, rather than words.

SummaryDespite what I believed was a fairly strong and thought provoking theme and topic, it appears that my execution of this projected screen work was not up to par. Going forward, I will try to make it more crisp in its presentation, as well as making the thematic elements more apparent, hopefully not relying too heavily on exposition from the artist statement.